Kaja Bouman

About Kaja

Hi all, welcome to my page.

The quote above is the opening line of one of my favorite novels, The Furrows by Namwali Serpell. It’s a story about grief, regret, and the inevitability of death. While those themes are not directly related to my work, that first sentence captures something essential about journalism, the kind of journalism I aspire to practice.

For a long time, I believed allowing emotion to take up space made my stories subjective or even biased. I’ve come to see that approach as a cautious, even restrictive way of thinking. A part of my heart is always in the Middle East, not only the analytical part of my brain drawn to history and geopolitics, and I’m no longer afraid to admit that. I truly believe my stories are better for it.

So, while that may give you a sense of the kind of journalist I am, I’ll also provide some practical background as well. I studied journalism in the Netherlands and later earned an MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I lived in Israel for three years, reporting from cities across Israel, Palestine, and Egypt. I then moved to Morocco to work as a foreign correspondent. Six months later, as the pandemic closed borders around the world, I boarded a plane back to the Netherlands, assuming, naively, that I would return within a few months (I didn’t).

As the pandemic reshaped the world, I built a career back home. I worked on the morning radio talk show Spraakmakers, joined a season of the evening television program M, became a producer on the foreign desk of public broadcaster NOS, produced a summer series for the investigative television program Radar, and later joined the foreign desk of the current affairs program Nieuwsuur.

Today, I continue to freelance, valuing the freedom to travel regularly to the Middle East. In recent years, I’ve reported extensively on the war in Gaza. This year, I hope to expand my reporting to other countries in the region, and to tell more stories closer to home in the Netherlands as well.